1 News about PCRE releases
2 ------------------------
4 Release 8.38 23-November-2015
5 -----------------------------
7 This is bug-fix release. Note that this library (now called PCRE1) is now being
8 maintained for bug fixes only. New projects are advised to use the new PCRE2
12 Release 8.37 28-April-2015
13 --------------------------
15 This is bug-fix release. Note that this library (now called PCRE1) is now being
16 maintained for bug fixes only. New projects are advised to use the new PCRE2
20 Release 8.36 26-September-2014
21 ------------------------------
23 This is primarily a bug-fix release. However, in addition, the Unicode data
24 tables have been updated to Unicode 7.0.0.
27 Release 8.35 04-April-2014
28 --------------------------
30 There have been performance improvements for classes containing non-ASCII
31 characters and the "auto-possessification" feature has been extended. Other
32 minor improvements have been implemented and bugs fixed. There is a new callout
33 feature to enable applications to do detailed stack checks at compile time, to
34 avoid running out of stack for deeply nested parentheses. The JIT compiler has
35 been extended with experimental support for ARM-64, MIPS-64, and PPC-LE.
38 Release 8.34 15-December-2013
39 -----------------------------
41 As well as fixing the inevitable bugs, performance has been improved by
42 refactoring and extending the amount of "auto-possessification" that PCRE does.
43 Other notable changes:
45 . Implemented PCRE_INFO_MATCH_EMPTY, which yields 1 if the pattern can match
46 an empty string. If it can, pcretest shows this in its information output.
48 . A back reference to a named subpattern when there is more than one of the
49 same name now checks them in the order in which they appear in the pattern.
50 The first one that is set is used for the reference. Previously only the
51 first one was inspected. This change makes PCRE more compatible with Perl.
53 . Unicode character properties were updated from Unicode 6.3.0.
55 . The character VT has been added to the set of characters that match \s and
56 are generally treated as white space, following this same change in Perl
57 5.18. There is now no difference between "Perl space" and "POSIX space".
59 . Perl has changed its handling of \8 and \9. If there is no previously
60 encountered capturing group of those numbers, they are treated as the
61 literal characters 8 and 9 instead of a binary zero followed by the
62 literals. PCRE now does the same.
64 . Following Perl, added \o{} to specify codepoints in octal, making it
65 possible to specify values greater than 0777 and also making them
68 . In UCP mode, \s was not matching two of the characters that Perl matches,
69 namely NEL (U+0085) and MONGOLIAN VOWEL SEPARATOR (U+180E), though they
72 . Add JIT support for the 64 bit TileGX architecture.
74 . Upgraded the handling of the POSIX classes [:graph:], [:print:], and
75 [:punct:] when PCRE_UCP is set so as to include the same characters as Perl
78 . Perl no longer allows group names to start with digits, so I have made this
81 . Added support for [[:<:]] and [[:>:]] as used in the BSD POSIX library to
82 mean "start of word" and "end of word", respectively, as a transition aid.
85 Release 8.33 28-May-2013
86 --------------------------
88 A number of bugs are fixed, and some performance improvements have been made.
89 There are also some new features, of which these are the most important:
91 . The behaviour of the backtracking verbs has been rationalized and
92 documented in more detail.
94 . JIT now supports callouts and all of the backtracking verbs.
96 . Unicode validation has been updated in the light of Unicode Corrigendum #9,
97 which points out that "non characters" are not "characters that may not
98 appear in Unicode strings" but rather "characters that are reserved for
99 internal use and have only local meaning".
101 . (*LIMIT_MATCH=d) and (*LIMIT_RECURSION=d) have been added so that the
102 creator of a pattern can specify lower (but not higher) limits for the
105 . The PCRE_NEVER_UTF option is available to prevent pattern-writers from using
106 the (*UTF) feature, as this could be a security issue.
109 Release 8.32 30-November-2012
110 -----------------------------
112 This release fixes a number of bugs, but also has some new features. These are
115 . There is now support for 32-bit character strings and UTF-32. Like the
116 16-bit support, this is done by compiling a separate 32-bit library.
118 . \X now matches a Unicode extended grapheme cluster.
120 . Case-independent matching of Unicode characters that have more than one
121 "other case" now makes all three (or more) characters equivalent. This
122 applies, for example, to Greek Sigma, which has two lowercase versions.
124 . Unicode character properties are updated to Unicode 6.2.0.
126 . The EBCDIC support, which had decayed, has had a spring clean.
128 . A number of JIT optimizations have been added, which give faster JIT
129 execution speed. In addition, a new direct interface to JIT execution is
130 available. This bypasses some of the sanity checks of pcre_exec() to give a
133 . A number of issues in pcregrep have been fixed, making it more compatible
134 with GNU grep. In particular, --exclude and --include (and variants) apply
135 to all files now, not just those obtained from scanning a directory
136 recursively. In Windows environments, the default action for directories is
137 now "skip" instead of "read" (which provokes an error).
139 . If the --only-matching (-o) option in pcregrep is specified multiple
140 times, each one causes appropriate output. For example, -o1 -o2 outputs the
141 substrings matched by the 1st and 2nd capturing parentheses. A separating
142 string can be specified by --om-separator (default empty).
144 . When PCRE is built via Autotools using a version of gcc that has the
145 "visibility" feature, it is used to hide internal library functions that are
146 not part of the public API.
149 Release 8.31 06-July-2012
150 -------------------------
152 This is mainly a bug-fixing release, with a small number of developments:
154 . The JIT compiler now supports partial matching and the (*MARK) and
157 . PCRE_INFO_MAXLOOKBEHIND can be used to find the longest lookbehind in a
160 . There should be a performance improvement when using the heap instead of the
163 . pcregrep can now be linked with libedit as an alternative to libreadline.
165 . pcregrep now has a --file-list option where the list of files to scan is
168 . pcregrep now recognizes binary files and there are related options.
170 . The Unicode tables have been updated to 6.1.0.
172 As always, the full list of changes is in the ChangeLog file.
175 Release 8.30 04-February-2012
176 -----------------------------
178 Release 8.30 introduces a major new feature: support for 16-bit character
179 strings, compiled as a separate library. There are a few changes to the
180 8-bit library, in addition to some bug fixes.
182 . The pcre_info() function, which has been obsolete for over 10 years, has
185 . When a compiled pattern was saved to a file and later reloaded on a host
186 with different endianness, PCRE used automatically to swap the bytes in some
187 of the data fields. With the advent of the 16-bit library, where more of this
188 swapping is needed, it is no longer done automatically. Instead, the bad
189 endianness is detected and a specific error is given. The user can then call
190 a new function called pcre_pattern_to_host_byte_order() (or an equivalent
191 16-bit function) to do the swap.
193 . In UTF-8 mode, the values 0xd800 to 0xdfff are not legal Unicode
194 code points and are now faulted. (They are the so-called "surrogates"
195 that are reserved for coding high values in UTF-16.)
198 Release 8.21 12-Dec-2011
199 ------------------------
201 This is almost entirely a bug-fix release. The only new feature is the ability
202 to obtain the size of the memory used by the JIT compiler.
205 Release 8.20 21-Oct-2011
206 ------------------------
208 The main change in this release is the inclusion of Zoltan Herczeg's
209 just-in-time compiler support, which can be accessed by building PCRE with
210 --enable-jit. Large performance benefits can be had in many situations. 8.20
211 also fixes an unfortunate bug that was introduced in 8.13 as well as tidying up
212 a number of infelicities and differences from Perl.
215 Release 8.13 16-Aug-2011
216 ------------------------
218 This is mainly a bug-fix release. There has been a lot of internal refactoring.
219 The Unicode tables have been updated. The only new feature in the library is
220 the passing of *MARK information to callouts. Some additions have been made to
221 pcretest to make testing easier and more comprehensive. There is a new option
222 for pcregrep to adjust its internal buffer size.
225 Release 8.12 15-Jan-2011
226 ------------------------
228 This release fixes some bugs in pcregrep, one of which caused the tests to fail
229 on 64-bit big-endian systems. There are no changes to the code of the library.
232 Release 8.11 10-Dec-2010
233 ------------------------
235 A number of bugs in the library and in pcregrep have been fixed. As always, see
236 ChangeLog for details. The following are the non-bug-fix changes:
238 . Added --match-limit and --recursion-limit to pcregrep.
240 . Added an optional parentheses number to the -o and --only-matching options
243 . Changed the way PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD affects the matching of $, \z, \Z, \b, and
246 . Added PCRE_ERROR_SHORTUTF8 to make it possible to distinguish between a
247 bad UTF-8 sequence and one that is incomplete when using PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD.
249 . Recognize (*NO_START_OPT) at the start of a pattern to set the PCRE_NO_
250 START_OPTIMIZE option, which is now allowed at compile time
253 Release 8.10 25-Jun-2010
254 ------------------------
256 There are two major additions: support for (*MARK) and friends, and the option
257 PCRE_UCP, which changes the behaviour of \b, \d, \s, and \w (and their
258 opposites) so that they make use of Unicode properties. There are also a number
259 of lesser new features, and several bugs have been fixed. A new option,
260 --line-buffered, has been added to pcregrep, for use when it is connected to
264 Release 8.02 19-Mar-2010
265 ------------------------
267 Another bug-fix release.
270 Release 8.01 19-Jan-2010
271 ------------------------
273 This is a bug-fix release. Several bugs in the code itself and some bugs and
274 infelicities in the build system have been fixed.
277 Release 8.00 19-Oct-09
278 ----------------------
280 Bugs have been fixed in the library and in pcregrep. There are also some
281 enhancements. Restrictions on patterns used for partial matching have been
282 removed, extra information is given for partial matches, the partial matching
283 process has been improved, and an option to make a partial match override a
284 full match is available. The "study" process has been enhanced by finding a
285 lower bound matching length. Groups with duplicate numbers may now have
286 duplicated names without the use of PCRE_DUPNAMES. However, they may not have
287 different names. The documentation has been revised to reflect these changes.
288 The version number has been expanded to 3 digits as it is clear that the rate
289 of change is not slowing down.
292 Release 7.9 11-Apr-09
293 ---------------------
295 Mostly bugfixes and tidies with just a couple of minor functional additions.
298 Release 7.8 05-Sep-08
299 ---------------------
301 More bug fixes, plus a performance improvement in Unicode character property
305 Release 7.7 07-May-08
306 ---------------------
308 This is once again mainly a bug-fix release, but there are a couple of new
312 Release 7.6 28-Jan-08
313 ---------------------
315 The main reason for having this release so soon after 7.5 is because it fixes a
316 potential buffer overflow problem in pcre_compile() when run in UTF-8 mode. In
317 addition, the CMake configuration files have been brought up to date.
320 Release 7.5 10-Jan-08
321 ---------------------
323 This is mainly a bug-fix release. However the ability to link pcregrep with
324 libz or libbz2 and the ability to link pcretest with libreadline have been
325 added. Also the --line-offsets and --file-offsets options were added to
329 Release 7.4 21-Sep-07
330 ---------------------
332 The only change of specification is the addition of options to control whether
333 \R matches any Unicode line ending (the default) or just CR, LF, and CRLF.
334 Otherwise, the changes are bug fixes and a refactoring to reduce the number of
335 relocations needed in a shared library. There have also been some documentation
336 updates, in particular, some more information about using CMake to build PCRE
337 has been added to the NON-UNIX-USE file.
340 Release 7.3 28-Aug-07
341 ---------------------
343 Most changes are bug fixes. Some that are not:
345 1. There is some support for Perl 5.10's experimental "backtracking control
346 verbs" such as (*PRUNE).
348 2. UTF-8 checking is now as per RFC 3629 instead of RFC 2279; this is more
349 restrictive in the strings it accepts.
351 3. Checking for potential integer overflow has been made more dynamic, and as a
352 consequence there is no longer a hard limit on the size of a subpattern that
353 has a limited repeat count.
355 4. When CRLF is a valid line-ending sequence, pcre_exec() and pcre_dfa_exec()
356 no longer advance by two characters instead of one when an unanchored match
357 fails at CRLF if there are explicit CR or LF matches within the pattern.
358 This gets rid of some anomalous effects that previously occurred.
360 5. Some PCRE-specific settings for varying the newline options at the start of
361 a pattern have been added.
364 Release 7.2 19-Jun-07
365 ---------------------
367 WARNING: saved patterns that were compiled by earlier versions of PCRE must be
368 recompiled for use with 7.2 (necessitated by the addition of \K, \h, \H, \v,
371 Correction to the notes for 7.1: the note about shared libraries for Windows is
372 wrong. Previously, three libraries were built, but each could function
373 independently. For example, the pcreposix library also included all the
374 functions from the basic pcre library. The change is that the three libraries
375 are no longer independent. They are like the Unix libraries. To use the
376 pcreposix functions, for example, you need to link with both the pcreposix and
377 the basic pcre library.
379 Some more features from Perl 5.10 have been added:
381 (?-n) and (?+n) relative references for recursion and subroutines.
383 (?(-n) and (?(+n) relative references as conditions.
385 \k{name} and \g{name} are synonyms for \k<name>.
387 \K to reset the start of the matched string; for example, (foo)\Kbar
388 matches bar preceded by foo, but only sets bar as the matched string.
390 (?| introduces a group where the capturing parentheses in each alternative
391 start from the same number; for example, (?|(abc)|(xyz)) sets capturing
392 parentheses number 1 in both cases.
394 \h, \H, \v, \V match horizontal and vertical whitespace, respectively.
397 Release 7.1 24-Apr-07
398 ---------------------
400 There is only one new feature in this release: a linebreak setting of
401 PCRE_NEWLINE_ANYCRLF. It is a cut-down version of PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY, which
402 recognizes only CRLF, CR, and LF as linebreaks.
404 A few bugs are fixed (see ChangeLog for details), but the major change is a
405 complete re-implementation of the build system. This now has full Autotools
406 support and so is now "standard" in some sense. It should help with compiling
407 PCRE in a wide variety of environments.
409 NOTE: when building shared libraries for Windows, three dlls are now built,
410 called libpcre, libpcreposix, and libpcrecpp. Previously, everything was
411 included in a single dll.
413 Another important change is that the dftables auxiliary program is no longer
414 compiled and run at "make" time by default. Instead, a default set of character
415 tables (assuming ASCII coding) is used. If you want to use dftables to generate
416 the character tables as previously, add --enable-rebuild-chartables to the
417 "configure" command. You must do this if you are compiling PCRE to run on a
418 system that uses EBCDIC code.
420 There is a discussion about character tables in the README file. The default is
421 not to use dftables so that that there is no problem when cross-compiling.
424 Release 7.0 19-Dec-06
425 ---------------------
427 This release has a new major number because there have been some internal
428 upheavals to facilitate the addition of new optimizations and other facilities,
429 and to make subsequent maintenance and extension easier. Compilation is likely
430 to be a bit slower, but there should be no major effect on runtime performance.
431 Previously compiled patterns are NOT upwards compatible with this release. If
432 you have saved compiled patterns from a previous release, you will have to
433 re-compile them. Important changes that are visible to users are:
435 1. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 5.0.0, which adds
438 2. The option PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY causes PCRE to recognize any Unicode newline
439 sequence as a newline.
441 3. The \R escape matches a single Unicode newline sequence as a single unit.
443 4. New features that will appear in Perl 5.10 are now in PCRE. These include
444 alternative Perl syntax for named parentheses, and Perl syntax for
447 5. The C++ wrapper interface has been extended by the addition of a
448 QuoteMeta function and the ability to allow copy construction and
451 For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file.
454 Release 6.7 04-Jul-06
455 ---------------------
457 The main additions to this release are the ability to use the same name for
458 multiple sets of parentheses, and support for CRLF line endings in both the
459 library and pcregrep (and in pcretest for testing).
461 Thanks to Ian Taylor, the stack usage for many kinds of pattern has been
462 significantly reduced for certain subject strings.
465 Release 6.5 01-Feb-06
466 ---------------------
468 Important changes in this release:
470 1. A number of new features have been added to pcregrep.
472 2. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 4.1.0, and the
473 supported properties have been extended with script names such as "Arabic",
474 and the derived properties "Any" and "L&". This has necessitated a change to
475 the interal format of compiled patterns. Any saved compiled patterns that
476 use \p or \P must be recompiled.
478 3. The specification of recursion in patterns has been changed so that all
479 recursive subpatterns are automatically treated as atomic groups. Thus, for
480 example, (?R) is treated as if it were (?>(?R)). This is necessary because
481 otherwise there are situations where recursion does not work.
483 See the ChangeLog for a complete list of changes, which include a number of bug
487 Release 6.0 07-Jun-05
488 ---------------------
490 The release number has been increased to 6.0 because of the addition of several
491 major new pieces of functionality.
493 A new function, pcre_dfa_exec(), which implements pattern matching using a DFA
494 algorithm, has been added. This has a number of advantages for certain cases,
495 though it does run more slowly, and lacks the ability to capture substrings. On
496 the other hand, it does find all matches, not just the first, and it works
497 better for partial matching. The pcrematching man page discusses the
500 The pcretest program has been enhanced so that it can make use of the new
501 pcre_dfa_exec() matching function and the extra features it provides.
503 The distribution now includes a C++ wrapper library. This is built
504 automatically if a C++ compiler is found. The pcrecpp man page discusses this
507 The code itself has been re-organized into many more files, one for each
508 function, so it no longer requires everything to be linked in when static
509 linkage is used. As a consequence, some internal functions have had to have
510 their names exposed. These functions all have names starting with _pcre_. They
511 are undocumented, and are not intended for use by outside callers.
513 The pcregrep program has been enhanced with new functionality such as
514 multiline-matching and options for output more matching context. See the
515 ChangeLog for a complete list of changes to the library and the utility
519 Release 5.0 13-Sep-04
520 ---------------------
522 The licence under which PCRE is released has been changed to the more
523 conventional "BSD" licence.
525 In the code, some bugs have been fixed, and there are also some major changes
526 in this release (which is why I've increased the number to 5.0). Some changes
527 are internal rearrangements, and some provide a number of new facilities. The
530 1. There's an "automatic callout" feature that inserts callouts before every
531 item in the regex, and there's a new callout field that gives the position
532 in the pattern - useful for debugging and tracing.
534 2. The extra_data structure can now be used to pass in a set of character
535 tables at exec time. This is useful if compiled regex are saved and re-used
536 at a later time when the tables may not be at the same address. If the
537 default internal tables are used, the pointer saved with the compiled
538 pattern is now set to NULL, which means that you don't need to do anything
539 special unless you are using custom tables.
541 3. It is possible, with some restrictions on the content of the regex, to
542 request "partial" matching. A special return code is given if all of the
543 subject string matched part of the regex. This could be useful for testing
544 an input field as it is being typed.
546 4. There is now some optional support for Unicode character properties, which
547 means that the patterns items such as \p{Lu} and \X can now be used. Only
548 the general category properties are supported. If PCRE is compiled with this
549 support, an additional 90K data structure is include, which increases the
550 size of the library dramatically.
552 5. There is support for saving compiled patterns and re-using them later.
554 6. There is support for running regular expressions that were compiled on a
555 different host with the opposite endianness.
557 7. The pcretest program has been extended to accommodate the new features.
559 The main internal rearrangement is that sequences of literal characters are no
560 longer handled as strings. Instead, each character is handled on its own. This
561 makes some UTF-8 handling easier, and makes the support of partial matching
562 possible. Compiled patterns containing long literal strings will be larger as a
563 result of this change; I hope that performance will not be much affected.
566 Release 4.5 01-Dec-03
567 ---------------------
569 Again mainly a bug-fix and tidying release, with only a couple of new features:
571 1. It's possible now to compile PCRE so that it does not use recursive
572 function calls when matching. Instead it gets memory from the heap. This slows
573 things down, but may be necessary on systems with limited stacks.
575 2. UTF-8 string checking has been tightened to reject overlong sequences and to
576 check that a starting offset points to the start of a character. Failure of the
577 latter returns a new error code: PCRE_ERROR_BADUTF8_OFFSET.
579 3. PCRE can now be compiled for systems that use EBCDIC code.
582 Release 4.4 21-Aug-03
583 ---------------------
585 This is mainly a bug-fix and tidying release. The only new feature is that PCRE
586 checks UTF-8 strings for validity by default. There is an option to suppress
587 this, just in case anybody wants that teeny extra bit of performance.
593 Sorry, I forgot about updating the NEWS file for these releases. Please take a
597 Release 4.0 17-Feb-03
598 ---------------------
600 There have been a lot of changes for the 4.0 release, adding additional
601 functionality and mending bugs. Below is a list of the highlights of the new
602 functionality. For full details of these features, please consult the
603 documentation. For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file.
605 1. Support for Perl's \Q...\E escapes.
607 2. "Possessive quantifiers" ?+, *+, ++, and {,}+ which come from Sun's Java
608 package. They provide some syntactic sugar for simple cases of "atomic
611 3. Support for the \G assertion. It is true when the current matching position
612 is at the start point of the match.
614 4. A new feature that provides some of the functionality that Perl provides
615 with (?{...}). The facility is termed a "callout". The way it is done in PCRE
616 is for the caller to provide an optional function, by setting pcre_callout to
617 its entry point. To get the function called, the regex must include (?C) at
620 5. Support for recursive calls to individual subpatterns. This makes it really
621 easy to get totally confused.
623 6. Support for named subpatterns. The Python syntax (?P<name>...) is used to
626 7. Several extensions to UTF-8 support; it is now fairly complete. There is an
627 option for pcregrep to make it operate in UTF-8 mode.
629 8. The single man page has been split into a number of separate man pages.
630 These also give rise to individual HTML pages which are put in a separate
631 directory. There is an index.html page that lists them all. Some hyperlinking
632 between the pages has been installed.
635 Release 3.5 15-Aug-01
636 ---------------------
638 1. The configuring system has been upgraded to use later versions of autoconf
639 and libtool. By default it builds both a shared and a static library if the OS
640 supports it. You can use --disable-shared or --disable-static on the configure
641 command if you want only one of them.
643 2. The pcretest utility is now installed along with pcregrep because it is
644 useful for users (to test regexs) and by doing this, it automatically gets
645 relinked by libtool. The documentation has been turned into a man page, so
646 there are now .1, .txt, and .html versions in /doc.
648 3. Upgrades to pcregrep:
649 (i) Added long-form option names like gnu grep.
650 (ii) Added --help to list all options with an explanatory phrase.
651 (iii) Added -r, --recursive to recurse into sub-directories.
652 (iv) Added -f, --file to read patterns from a file.
654 4. Added --enable-newline-is-cr and --enable-newline-is-lf to the configure
655 script, to force use of CR or LF instead of \n in the source. On non-Unix
656 systems, the value can be set in config.h.
658 5. The limit of 200 on non-capturing parentheses is a _nesting_ limit, not an
659 absolute limit. Changed the text of the error message to make this clear, and
660 likewise updated the man page.
662 6. The limit of 99 on the number of capturing subpatterns has been removed.
663 The new limit is 65535, which I hope will not be a "real" limit.
666 Release 3.3 01-Aug-00
667 ---------------------
669 There is some support for UTF-8 character strings. This is incomplete and
670 experimental. The documentation describes what is and what is not implemented.
671 Otherwise, this is just a bug-fixing release.
674 Release 3.0 01-Feb-00
675 ---------------------
677 1. A "configure" script is now used to configure PCRE for Unix systems. It
678 builds a Makefile, a config.h file, and the pcre-config script.
680 2. PCRE is built as a shared library by default.
682 3. There is support for POSIX classes such as [:alpha:].
684 5. There is an experimental recursion feature.
686 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
687 IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSIONS BEFORE 2.00
689 Please note that there has been a change in the API such that a larger
690 ovector is required at matching time, to provide some additional workspace.
691 The new man page has details. This change was necessary in order to support
692 some of the new functionality in Perl 5.005.
694 IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.00
696 Another (I hope this is the last!) change has been made to the API for the
697 pcre_compile() function. An additional argument has been added to make it
698 possible to pass over a pointer to character tables built in the current
699 locale by pcre_maketables(). To use the default tables, this new argument
700 should be passed as NULL.
702 IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.05
704 Yet another (and again I hope this really is the last) change has been made
705 to the API for the pcre_exec() function. An additional argument has been
706 added to make it possible to start the match other than at the start of the
707 subject string. This is important if there are lookbehinds. The new man
708 page has the details, but you just want to convert existing programs, all
709 you need to do is to stick in a new fifth argument to pcre_exec(), with a
710 value of zero. For example, change
712 pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, options, ovec, ovecsize)
714 pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, 0, options, ovec, ovecsize)